They were obsessed with how it would play in the media. Five days before its release, Powell asked Campbell: ‘Alastair – what will be the headline in the Standard on day of publication?’ He added prosaically: ‘It needs checking for typos.’106
When the final draft was submitted it had the title: ‘Iraq’s Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government’. On his account, it was Scarlett’s own pen that went through the word ‘programme’ before it was finally published on 24 September.107 It had a much more certain ring when entitled ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government’.
To add to the drama of the dossier’s publication, Parliament was recalled. On the eve of the recall, the Cabinet convened on Monday, 23 September, the first time it had met in more than eight weeks. Blair had already corralled the big beasts behind him in advance of the meeting. Gordon Brown made a brief intervention which stressed the importance of the United Nations and declared the threat of WMD to be ‘the best argument’. Afterwards, Alastair Campbell went up to him and said: ‘Thanks for that intervention.’ Jack Straw, currently believing that he had successfully impaled Blair on the commitment to work through the UN, did not air any of his private anxieties. Blair ignored a suggestion from Patricia Hewitt that the Attorney-General should come to Cabinet to explain the legal position on war.108
Only Robin Cook and Clare Short were openly critical about the prospect of military action. It became a prevalent myth that the Cabinet never talked about Iraq in the run-up to the war. In fact, it was a topic at more than twenty of their meetings in 2002 and early 2003.109 There was plenty of quantity about their discussions; the real flaw was the lack of quality. Much of the time at most of those meetings was dominated by updates on the latest situation from Blair, punctuated with occasional outbursts of anxiety from worried ministers, which were then parried by expressions of support from the loyalists. What the Cabinet never had was a deep debate about the diplomatic and military options with all the facts in front of them.110 Papers were prepared for Cabinet, but Blair declined to circulate them to his ministers.111 There never was an agreed Cabinet strategy; they were sucked along in Blair’s slipstream. The general view of the Cabinet was: ‘We’ll hang on to Tony’s ankles and he’ll hang on to Bush’s and we might get through this without blowing the world apart.’112 On this occasion in late September 2002, ministers eagerly saluted the Prime Minister for securing Bush’s agreement to use the UN. Cook was keeping a diary for later publication. In it he lamented that this Cabinet was ‘a grim meeting. Much of the two hours was taken up with a succession of loyalty oaths for Tony’s line.’113 He did not record in his diary that even the dissident Cook gushed to Blair: ‘Tony, you’ve played a blinder.’ Sycophancy from that source was too much for John Reid, the pugnaciously loyal Northern Ireland Secretary. He acidly remarked that he wanted to join everyone else’s admiration for the Prime Minister, but ‘the one thing I’m not going to say is that you played a blinder. It would be especially inappropriate when I am sitting next to David [Blunkett].’ Nearly everyone, except Cook, chortled at the joke. John Prescott came in at the end. ‘We must all stick together behind Tony,’ he lectured them and no-one was to breathe a word of their discussions to the press.114
The doubters around his own top table made it even more important to Blair that he sounded evangelically certain when he presented the fifty-page dossier to the House of Commons the next day.
The document bore his signature on the chilling foreword: ‘I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on weapons of mass destruction, and that he has to be stopped.’
He highlighted the claim that ‘the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within forty five minutes of an order to use them.’115
The false claim that Iraq could use WMD within forty-five minutes of receiving an order from Saddam was seen as such a potent persuader that it was repeated no fewer than four times in the dossier.
Blair did not reveal to MPs that intelligence officials, WMD experts and even his own staff had privately expressed the view that the material did not show that Saddam was any sort of imminent threat.
Laying the dossier before the Commons, he declared: ‘His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down, it is up and running.’ He amplified: ‘That means biological, chemical, nuclear weapons capability.’
He presented Saddam as ‘a current and serious threat’ even though he had been minuted just a week before by his Chief of Staff that they had ‘nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam’.
Blair drew attention to the claim that Iraq would ‘only be a year or two’ away from having nukes ‘if Saddam were able to purchase fissile material illegally’. When he declared his ‘passionate’ belief in the alliance with the United States as ‘fundamental’ to Britain there was a throaty roar of approval from Conservative MPs.116 On his own benches behind him, there was a lot of silence. The number of rebels was, though, contained to fifty-six.
The dossier did have some effect in shaping public opinion and minimising dissent. Clare Short reckons it helped to feed a feeling in Labour’s ranks that ‘Tony must know something we don’t.’117 Jack Straw regards the dossier as ‘very, very important in terms of making the argument’.118 An opponent of war, the former Cabinet minister Frank Dobson believes: ‘A few were convinced and more were looking for a reason to be convinced.’119
Those deeply sceptical about the case for military action remained unimpressed. Robin Cook was ‘surprised there was so little new material in it’ and saw ‘no new evidence … of a dramatic increase in threat requiring urgent invasion’.120
Media reaction depended on who was doing the reacting. Newspapers who wanted to be chilled by the dossier turned it into apocalyptic headlines.
The Times pleased Number 10 by shivering its readers with the thought that ‘Saddam could have nuclear bomb in year’.121 Its Murdoch-owned tabloid sister, the Sun, curdled the blood by shouting: ‘He’s got them. Let’s get him.’122
Much of the media got excited by the claim that Saddam could deploy WMD within forty-five minutes, that being one of the apparently genuinely new pieces of information. Journalists got the impression that this meant Saddam could launch WMD on ballistic missiles with sufficient range to hit Cyprus. ‘45 minutes to attack’ was how the Evening Standard alarmed Londoners.123
The Defence Secretary understood that these were not ballistic missiles. ‘I asked. I knew.’124 Yet no-one corrected this false presentation of the alleged threat. It was only when Scarlett was questioned nearly a year later at the Hutton Inquiry that it emerged that this was only meant to refer to the use of WMD as a battlefield weapon. In other words, Iraq was only equipped to use them if invaded, not to rain WMD down on its neighbours. Even that claim would anyway prove to be false.
The intelligence chiefs had succumbed to the frenzied and insidious pressure from the Prime Minister and his senior staff to deliver the goods. The propagandist Campbell supervised the spinning of thin, dated and flaky material to make the threat look real, new and urgent. The lawyer Blair then further buried all the caveats and uncertainties to present the dossier with his trademark evangelical certainty. Then pro-war elements of the media inflated the claims into the scariest headlines they could contrive.
Within a year of publication, it became apparent that the majority of the claims in the dossier, especially the most frightening ones, were distortions, exaggerations or downright false. The source of the infamously wrong claim that WMD could be launched in forty-five minutes was exposed as an Iraqi brigadier in Baghdad who did ‘not know very much about it’: a single, uncorroborated source who was passing on hearsay from another single, uncorroborated source.125 That claim became so infamous that it was eve
n satirised in an episode of Dr Who.
Far from bristling with WMD, prior to the war Iraq ‘did not have significant – if any – stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them’, concluded the later inquiry.126 Opinion about Tony Blair then divided into two schools of thought. One very popular view was that the Prime Minister had lied his way into the war. As countless banners, placards, T-shirts and web posts had it, he was the ‘Bliar’. Even some who were originally supporters of the war came to the conclusion that they were manipulated by a mendacious Prime Minister.
Another view, held by the minority who still defended him, was that spin was a legitimate response to an aggressive media and Blair had done no more than any leader does when fighting for a cause.127
Blair did not take Britain into war on a lie in the sense that he knew all along that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction and hoped no-one would hold him to account for that afterwards. He genuinely believed that the Iraqi dictator was intent on possessing the most horrific weapons and the Prime Minister was sincerely seized by a fear of the consequences of rogue states combining with terrorist actors.
It should also be added that he was far from alone in that belief. All of the world’s leading intelligence agencies, including the French and Russians, believed that Saddam had at least some WMD and a capability to manufacture more.
Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of the Defence Staff, asked to see the CXs, the raw intelligence material. He came away certain that Saddam had WMD. ‘If the head of MI6 tells you this is good stuff, you take it at face value.’128
Blair’s culpability was in vastly exaggerating the accuracy and potency of unreliable and often bogus intelligence by calling it ‘extensive and detailed’ when that was the opposite of the truth. ‘More weight was put on it than the intelligence was strong enough to bear’ is the careful conclusion of Robin Butler, who, being a mandarin, is constitutionally incapable of directly calling Blair mendacious. ‘The interpretation was stretched to the limit.’129
And beyond it. Blair was a sincere deceiver. He told the truth about what he believed; he lied about the strength of the evidence for that belief.
It was unprecedented for intelligence to be used for propaganda and the discrediting of the dossier did damage without parallel. This episode corroded the credibility of the intelligence services. More than any other single document published in the last fifty years, it shredded public trust in politicians in general and Number 10 in particular. When its claims were exposed as false, a train of events was set in motion which would escalate into the greatest crisis of Tony Blair’s premiership.
‘I’ve lost my love of popularity for its own sake,’ the Prime Minister told his party conference when he addressed them in the faded baroque of Blackpool’s Winter Gardens on the first day of October.130 That was fortunate since his popularity was decaying anyway.
A third of the emergency resolutions tabled were about Iraq and they were almost unanimously hostile to war. Yet the conference did not prove quite as turbulent as the media predicted and Number 10 feared. Gordon Brown, who complained to ministers close to him that he was being ‘excluded’ by Blair and felt ‘weakened and marginalised’,131 delivered an unthreatening speech. There was not an eruption of protest when Blair told the conference that ‘sometimes in dealing with a dictator, the only chance of peace is readiness for war.’132 Some doubters and dissenters were temporarily muted by the argument that the best way to avoid war was to threaten Saddam with enough force to make him buckle. A motion opposed to war in any circumstances was defeated. In a warning shot to Blair, the conference passed a motion which said that there would have to be explicit sanction from the United Nations for any military action.
Blair was also bolstered by a guest appearance in Blackpool by Bill Clinton. His star quality had the Labour conference swooning in their seats. ‘I feel like I’ve just been made love to,’ one male minister sighed as the conference ovated for the former President.133 Clinton masked his own reservations about where Blair was headed and praised the Prime Minister as the only leader capable of bridging the divide between America and the rest of the world. ‘If he weren’t there to do this, I doubt if anyone else could.’134
Clinton was saying something entirely different in private. His side of the Atlantic, Democrats were bewildered. The former President asked Campbell: ‘Why is Blair helping Bush so much?’135
Blair was not just marching his own country down the road to invasion. Blair put a high-minded tone on the drive to war in ways that Bush never could and his support helped Bush to answer the criticism that it was a rash unilateral adventure. That thrilled the American neo-cons while disturbing their opponents.136
George Mitchell, the former Democratic Senator who was a peace envoy in both Northern Ireland and the Middle East, thought it ‘pretty obvious what President Bush got out of the relationship with Prime Minister Blair: a world figure who is articulate, who better explained Bush’s policies in the Middle East than he or anybody in his administration was able to do’.137
William Cohen, a Republican who served in the Clinton Cabinet, agrees: ‘The strength of his conviction bolstered President Bush because of Blair’s enormous popularity here. That gave great credibility to the President’s advocacy and sure made it more difficult for people to raise their hand and question the wisdom of it.’138
That October, and by thumping majorities, Congress gave Bush the broad authorisation to declare a war as and when he saw fit.
7. Trouble and Strife
Nearly two years had passed since Peter Mandelson’s second ejection from the Cabinet, but he remained one of the most famous faces in Britain. He took one of the anonymous back entrances into Number 10 that winter’s day so his arrival would be invisible to the media mob camped on Downing Street. Once he had slipped inside the Georgian house, he went up to the flat, where he found Tony and Cherie in a desperately bad way. They needed the old svengali’s counsel about the worst personal crisis to engulf them since they moved into Number 10.
Mandelson was a veteran of the inferno: he had twice been engulfed by scandal during the first term. ‘It’s a personal tragedy for Peter,’ the Prime Minister remarked to another party leader after the second sacking. ‘But he’s finished now.’1
As it turned out, Peter Mandelson was not quite finished and neither was Blair’s reliance on him in a crisis. The Prime Minister needed Mandelson again. Mandelson needed to be needed.
In December 2002, the Blairs were being consumed by ‘Cheriegate’, the appellation that the media were giving to the affair of the Prime Minister, his wife and a con man.
The root of it, as so often with New Labour, was money. Both of the Blairs liked money, a preoccupation that could be traced back to the insecurities of their childhoods. Tony’s family was never destitute, but they were forced to fall back on the generosity of friends during his adolescence when his father was debilitated by a stroke.
Cherie lost her father in a different way. Tony Booth was an actor, a drunk and a philanderer. He became such a mess that on one occasion he set himself alight while in an alcoholic haze. Cherie was largely cared for by her grandparents during the first two years of her life and then deserted by her father. She was scarred by ‘my sense of abandonment’.2 As a scholarship girl from a poor background, she was acutely conscious at secondary school that she came from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’.3 She was a clever woman with many achievements to her credit, but one still haunted by those childhood insecurities.
The more vicious press painted Cherie as entirely money-grubbing. That was a caricature of a complex woman who did a lot of unpaid work for charities, which was largely unsung in the media but appreciated by those whom she helped. The media gorged on an incident in Australia when she was invited to take some free gifts from a shop and helped herself to a lot. The press duly chortled over the spectacle of the Prime Minister’s wife on a ‘supermarket sweep’.
At conference time, Cherie would return from tours of the exhibition halls laden with bags of the promotional gifts that are given out by the exhibitors. These freebies were never exotic: pens, mouse mats, T-shirts, soft toys, sweets. They were hardly valuable. Yet piles of the bags would litter the Blairs’ conference hotel suite, much to the amusement of his aides. One female member of the Prime Minister’s court jokingly referred to Cherie as ‘a kleptomaniac’.4
There was another media feast about her love of money in 2004, when she took a substantial fee for taking part in a fund-raising roadshow for the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia. Even Cherie could see that ‘proved disastrous from a PR point of view’.5
The Blairs’ attitude towards money sparked friction with officialdom. Cherie took the view that she had to spend a lot on her clothing and hairdressing because she was under constant scrutiny as the Prime Minister’s wife.6 On her reckoning, she ought to have a budget and the taxpayer should reimburse some of the cost. ‘These were not small sums,’ says one senior official.7. It fell to Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary, to tell her that this couldn’t be done. She also repeatedly clashed with Sir Richard about how much the Blairs could spend on furnishings at Number 10. That was the cause of many ‘icy conversations’.8
She ‘resented it madly’ when Sir Richard vetoed billing the taxpayer for clothes and hairdressing.9 The Cabinet Secretary found it painfully awkward that he had to repeatedly reject expenses claims by the Prime Minister’s wife. ‘She didn’t like him saying no. Tony didn’t like him saying no.’10 Wilson tried to devolve the responsibility on to other officials, but that didn’t work. ‘It always comes back to me again,’ he would groan to fellow officials.11
The End of the Party Page 19
